Date Posted:11:02:33 06/18/13 Tue Author:Page Subject: Adding Congrats and Howdies
When Debi told me she'd swung by to tell y'all Hi, I realized just how long it's been since I was here, too. *sigh* Ah, the way life interferes with things. But I wanted to come by and say Howdy!
First and foremost: CONGRATULATIONS to Lady Morilka and your baby girl! What wonderful news!
Secondly: CONGRATULATIONS to Larn on the publication of your book! I just bought it for my Kindle, and I cannot wait to dive right in. I swear to you, there have been times over the past couple of years when I've thought, "I wonder what happened with Emma and Mike." Seriously. And now I can find out!
And third: Thanks to Debi for pimping my books. :) It's been a long, interesting journey since I sat here sweating bullets and hit "send" on my first post, a scene from the book that was at that time called The Rain Song. I owe you all a huge THANK YOU, because I truly believe that if I'd never posted here, that book would never have been completed. But completed it was. You knew it as The Rain Song, and later as Carey On, and it ended up as Crimson and Clover. I do have to tell you that a lot of the Homework assignments and critique pieces I posted here didn't make it into the final book, but if I'd never written them, I wouldn't have learned how to edit and polish and make my writing better. :)
Like Larn and Debi, I got a LOT of rejections when I started querying the book, but I kept pressing on until one day an email showed up in my inbox from Crimson Romance, an imprint of F+W Media, and they wanted the book! I was alone at home when I got that email, and let's just say that some ugly dancing took place along with some shouting and tears of joy. ;) After some very minor edits and a title change (which wasn't my idea, but I don't hate the title so it's all good) Crimson and Clover was published in February of this year. Since then it's been a wild ride of blog tours, author chats and other time consuming things that I never thought of when I dreamed of being a published author.
Not long after I signed my contract with Crimson Romance, another story idea popped into my head, and it would NOT let me be until I wrote it. I've never before written a book so fast (I would have written it even faster if I hadn't been distracted by the holidays) and before I knew it, I had another book - Athena's Daughter. I submitted it to my publisher, and *insert sound of brakes screaming on pavement* they didn't like it. They wanted me to make some serious changes to the story, changes I thought would be detrimental to the characters and book as a whole. I'm still scratching my head at just WHY they wanted me to make my two main characters totally unlikeable right off the bat, but I digress. So after flipping them a mental bird, I took a deep breath and self-published that puppy. To my utter amazement, the book took off like a shot, and has outsold Crimson and Clover by a huge margin. In fact, I'm still in shock at the way the book has been doing, and can only attribute it to fate since I've not done a lot of publicity for it.
But I would never have done any of that if I hadn't posted here first all those years ago.
There are a couple of things going on right now where you can enter to win an e-copy of Crimson and Clover, the book that began as The Rain Song/Carey On here at the Lit Forum. If you're reading this on June 18, Jay Carey is a competitor in a Hot Heroes Faceoff on Facebook, and at the end of the day I'll be giving away a copy of the book to one of the commenters/voters. So if you want to swing by, vote for Jay and get in the running to win, the link is HERE. Also, my publisher for that book is celebrating its first year, and I'm taking part in a blog hop to help promote it. On June 26 I'll be giving away an e-copy and a signed bookmark to one of the commenters on the blog post, so if you want to comment, that link is HERE. Then in July I'm taking part in an author chat at Writerspace, and I'll be giving away e-copies of Crimson and Clover and Athena's Daughter, as well as a paperback of Athena's Daughter. As the time for that draws nearer, I'll post updates at my website.
Plus, I'm trying to finish the book I'm calling Royal Orleans, part of which you've seen here over the years, so I can release it at the end of the summer. Whew!
And I promise to try to remember to come here more often and keep up with all of you. Again, I wouldn't be where I am now if y'all hadn't had my back in the very beginning! :)
Ok, I have to say the new tablet tricked me, or I would gave seen the last posts weeks ago. It claimed to do a refresh of the page but seems to have taken it out of the cache. A bug CONGRATUKATIONS from this side of the ocean. That means I can finally read the whose story, yay. Not sure though when the hell I am to find tge time for that. Never in my kive has my reading pile been that high (just the books I already owne alone).
But I'll put them on the list none the less.
Lady Morilka
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